“Yes, how queerly she pronounced,” said
Mrs. Leighton. “Well, I ought to have told
them that I required the first week in advance.”

“Mamma! If that’s the way you’re
going to act!”

“Oh, of course, I couldn’t, after he wouldn’t
let her bargain for the rooms. I didn’t
like that.”

“I did. And you can see that they were
perfect ladies; or at least one of them.”
Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.

“Their being ladies won’t help if they’ve
got no money. It ’ll make it all the worse.”

“Very well, then; we have no money, either.
We’re a match for them any day there. We
can show them that two can play at that game.”

III.

Arnus Beaton’s studio looked at first glance
like many other painters’ studios. A gray
wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light;
casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints,
sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and there
lower down; a rickety table, with paint and palettes
and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly
on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval
silk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete
nakedness, with its head on one side, and a stocking
on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it;
dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor;
canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing
with costumes: these features one might notice
anywhere. But, besides, there was a bookcase with
an unusual number of books in it, and there was an
open colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled,
and scutcheoned, with foreign periodicals—­French
and English—­littering its leaf, and some
pages of manuscript scattered among them. Above
all, there was a sculptor’s revolving stand,
supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, with
an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the
clay and on the head of the old man who sat on the
platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with
several gifts to advantage in all; and most men seem
handicapped for the race if they have more than one.
But they are apparently immensely interested as well
as distracted by them. When Beaton was writing,
he would have agreed, up to a certain point, with
any one who said literature was his proper expression;
but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point,
he would have maintained against the world that he
was a colorist, and supremely a colorist. At
the certain point in either art he was apt to break
away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon
some other. In these moods he sometimes designed
elevations of buildings, very striking, very original,
very chic, very everything but habitable. It was
in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture,
which he had at first approached rather slightingly